Now, at each level, you will need someone that has been there – done that and has the business muscle memory to execute at that scale. Picking a mentor or coach or operators that have been to those levels is what is required. If you want to scale, you must pivot with the right people.

Think about large, fast growing companies that rotate executives as they scale up. Why? Because to scale, they know that the leadership that’s great at $1M isn’t the leadership that is great and appropriate at $100M or a Billion. This is natural up-leveling.

As an entrepreneur, you must acknowledge the hole in your competence and fill it with, talented, experienced, and seemingly expensive people…the cost to skip this truth is too costly.

The whole purpose of executing the plan is to arrive at the scaled size, operating like a well oiled machine. That is a scaled business.

Using a music metaphor, it’s like turning up the guitar amp and drowning out the vocals. The song suffers. It’s out of whack. It sounds like crap and people won’t listen for long or again and again. It’s ugly noise.

Your business should make sweet music to you, to its stakeholders and to a potential acquirer…oh, you don’t want to ever sell because it’s a legacy business? The valuation still matters..

When a business grows faster than the internals are adapted, the muscle memory of the organization will revert to the norm of what was. This happens even faster if during the changes you don’t harness the talent of people comfortable with the new level. They will unintentionally drive it right back down.

The people who are not ready to scale unintentionally hold the business back. If not, the business will revert to the previous level of comfort. Like clockwork.

So, if you plan to grow revenue…that is most typically to derive more cash profit. To get there you must execute the plan and to stay there you must install that new way of operating. There should be no hedging and no turning back. It becomes the new norm.